With the new method the engineers don’t just fabricate the robot, but also produce a surrounding “assembly scaffold” that’s attached to the bee-bot by tiny hinges. When the scaffold is lifted by pins, it folds the flat robot’s joints and turns it into a 3Dmodel.

The Harvard Monolithic Bee (or Mobee), for example, turns from a flat shape into a 2.4-millimetre-tall robot in just one movement — just like a pop-up book. The folding process takes less than a second.